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Willa Morgan was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, and her family moved to Dayton, OH when she was 5. After one of her friends opened a salon in Cleveland, OH, Willa and another friend of hers moved to Cleveland to work. Willa later opened up her own salon, which was attached to the back of her Fairfax home. Willa was a major part of Antioch, working in…

Theresa Bumpers is the current organ player at Antioch Baptist Church. She was born in Maryland and moved to Fairfax with her family. In her teenage years, she moved to Glenville, where she attended Glenville High School. Music became her hobby and later a career for her, where she would play with her family performing group at various churches…

Harriet Young was born in Cleveland and attended Antioch Baptist Church since she was an infant. During her time at Antioch, she participated in many clubs and community outreach programs, including making meals for the grieving and going to assisted living homes to visit the elderly. In addition, she enjoyed teaching the Bible to the youth in…

Doris Walter grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, where she lived there up until her second marriage. Walter was given the opportunity to move to Cleveland, where she maintained her career as a secretary at Antioch for 32 years. Some of her activities at Antioch include the Ruth B. McKinney mission circle, the Carl Stokes campaign, AGAPE, and the…

Tommie Bryant has been an active member of the Antioch Baptist Church since 1950 and recounts her experiences with the various Reverends and programs that have come to Antioch through the years, and how the church has changed.

Doris Allen was originally born in Shelby, Alabama, and moved to Cleveland when she was two years old. She had a very established great uncle living in Cleveland, Robert Hardy, who was the first African American to own property east of East 55th Street in Cleveland. Her father was drafted into the Army when she was 9, and their family moved back to…

Ora Sims was born on a cotton farm in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1917. Her parents owned the farm, which was rather unusual for African Americans in that area at the time. She recalls the hardships of farm life, including the boll weevil, but adds that in the Great Depression, she never felt poor because they grew all the food they needed. Sims…

Steve Bullock grew up in a large family in eastern North Carolina. His father was a sharecropper. Bullock attended Virginia Union University and recalls discrimination he faced while working in Virginia Beach the summer before enrolling at VUU. After college he entered the U.S. Army and was assigned to guard against communist infiltration at one of…

Margaret Peacock grew up in Columbus, Ohio. Her father worked for the railroad and her mother was a homemaker. She went to Wittenberg University were she met her husband Larry. They married when they were juniors. Peacock describes her involvement with organizations for black students at Wittenberg. After college, the Peacocks moved to Cleveland…

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The Center for Public History + Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University Department of History has been collecting oral history interviews since 2002 on an ongoing basis. If you would like to tell your story for the record, you can schedule an interview by emailing us at digitalhumanities@csuohio.edu. If you have questions about Rights and Reproductions, or would like us to remove your interview, please call us at (216) 687-2172. For more information about our work, please visit csudigitalhumanities.org.